Tag: Prospecting

The Power of a Positive Last Impression

There was a recent blog post on the benefits of hearing a quick “no” when prospecting. Here are some additional thoughts on that concept. When non-HPS salespeople hear you accept “no” for an answer, it goes against all of their traditional and logical sales indoctrination. Some say it’s counter-cultural, counter-productive, and at least counterintuitive.

They say you’re giving up control of the sale to the prospect. That you lost a sale. The truth is that you can’t lose what you never had in the first place.

And when you stop clinging to every potential “yes,” you actually regain control of your business.

When you accept a “not now” without resistance:

  • You free yourself to find the next “yes now.”
  • Everyone leaves with a positive last impression— which matters more than you think. Even more than a first impression.
  • A positive last impression creates a future opening— a chance for the next impression. And the next and the next.

It may feel unnatural at first. But letting go of the need to get what you think you need this time opens the possibility of a next time, when the prospect is ready—and doing so with integrity throughout the process.

You have a choice in every sales conversation, and you are in complete control of your choice:

  • You can attempt to drag out a fight with reality, or
  • You can create a memory of effortless collaboration and respect.

You wanted a “yes.” You didn’t get it. That’s okay. You still get to choose how you show up.

Because by giving your prospect the power to say “no,” you also keep your power to continue.

Why Hearing an Early “No” Is a Gift in Selling

In most sales training, “No” is treated like a problem.  Salespeople are taught to overcome objections, push past resistance, and keep trying until the prospect finally says yes.  The result is often stress, wasted time, and strained relationships.

High Probability Selling takes a completely different view.  In HPS, “No” is valuable information.  It is not rejection—it is simply clarity.  When a prospect says “No,” it means there is no high probability of a sale right now, and that allows us to move on without wasting more time or energy.

Why This Matters

Hearing “No” early in the conversation prevents us from chasing low-probability prospects.  It reduces the stress of long sales cycles filled with uncertainty.  Also, accepting the “No” immediately demonstrates respect:  prospects feel heard, because we are not trying to twist their “No” into a “Yes.”

For the salesperson, it frees up time to focus on better opportunities.  For the prospect, it makes the interaction feel clean and respectful, without pressure.

How “No” Leads to Better Yeses

By disqualifying quickly, we eliminate distractions and focus only on the people who actually want what we offer.  That creates a shorter, smoother path to sales that do happen.  These sales are stronger, stick longer, and are based on mutual trust and respect.

In High Probability Selling, “No” is not the end—it is the way we discover where the real opportunities are.  Each clear “No” moves us closer to the right “Yes.”

✅ In short: “No” is not our enemy in selling—it is one of our greatest allies.

Possibility vs. Probability in Selling

Most sales training is built around possibility.  If there is any chance that someone might buy, the salesperson is taught to keep pushing, persuading, and following up until something happens.  The thinking goes like this:  the more possibilities you chase, the more sales you will eventually close.

High Probability Selling takes a very different view.  Instead of chasing possibilities, we search for probabilities.  We want to know, right now, what the chances really are that someone will choose to buy from us.  If the probability is high enough, we continue the conversation.  If not, we set it aside and move on for now.

This shift changes everything.  Selling based on possibility is exhausting.  It means investing time and energy into people who may never buy, and who may only be willing to listen politely while you talk.  Selling based on probability is efficient, respectful, and freeing.  It allows both the seller and the prospect to be honest about what they want, without pressure or performance.

The difference is simple, but not small.  Possibility-based selling keeps salespeople trapped in chasing.  Probability-based selling sets them free to discover.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Please comment or reply to this post online, so others may benefit from your perspective. 

Why do they keep talking?

I have been cold call prospected at least 3 times this week. Yes, I still answer my phone.  Yes, I was born in the 1900s with all the other Luddites. 

And although it is currently not the 1900s, one persistent belief is still alive and kicking in sales.  The innocuous act of filling out an online lead magnet for some information by email has many hidden meanings.

One of those hidden meanings to many business people is that providing one’s email address to a business is immediately equated to becoming a hot lead for their product or service.

Fearing that my interest in their offering may suddenly go cold in 20 minutes, my phone rings and I answer it.  The call begins, most recently, with me trying to comprehend who the caller is and what they are offering.

The telephone prospector, often using a far eastern dialect (or AI) speaks as if we are in the latter part of an ongoing sales conversation.  They seem to believe that I already understand who they are and which company they are representing, because they rattle it off as if it’s a household name with instant recognition.  I am now of course confused at best.

For me, their business is not a household name. I don’t even remotely understand the caller’s name, if they even mentioned it. Their voice speeds up as the call goes further, perhaps trying to get in as many words as possible before I hang up?

30 long seconds into the call, I am absorbing less and less about what they are selling or offering.  They have spoken something like 150 plus words so far, most of which I can’t understand or relate to.  My brain has closed off 90 percent of my listening at this point.

Then it is time in their script to pitch the appointment with rhetoric promising the saving of time or the saving of money, which of course everyone will agree about.  When this approach doesn’t work, they try the alternate choice close on the appointment date and time.  At least 3 or 4 times.

By this time in their process, I no longer understand what they are selling, AND I no longer care.  All I want to do is to get off the phone.

I finally get a moment where I can interject something like, “I don’t have time for this and don’t need an appointment”.

My effort to be polite is of course ignored by the caller, who continues to repeatedly push for the appointment, while also claiming their intent to be brief.

I say no thank you, I don’t want an appointment because I have no idea what they’re even selling.

They finally say something least leaning towards goodbye, but then they have to profusely thank me for taking the time to listen to them and answer all of their shallow questions while they try one more time to set an appointment!

All I can think of at this point is WHY WHY WHY do they keep talking?  Everyone advises hanging up on them, sometimes preceded by an expletive, but with my brain offline, that’s easier said than done.

It’s 2025, aren’t they tired of all this talking yet?  I sure am.

Thoughts About Recipients’ Experiences When Receiving a Cold Call

The following is from a conversation between a fan of HPS and the author, and is published here with permission.

Hi Carl

Though I’m now retired I absolutely admire your HPS system, so enjoy following your posts etc including the latest “calling businesses/leaving messages”.

May I respond to this one with a thought.  Do your students have to consider what their recipients experience when they cold call?

My pet cold calling irritants as a recipient are when I hear their obvious sales pitch.  It instantly makes me immediately disinterested.

My pet hates are:

  1. “How are you today”
  2. Speaking their intro too quickly just to get it out of the way
  3. “I’m calling to save you money on your . . . Phone/energy/other “
  4. Thinking I should be interested in that!

So I wondered what others don’t like to hear when they get cold called.  Might help them understand what needs to be removed/modified.

Ian Clark

Hello Ian,

What you say makes a lot of sense. 

High Probability Selling was not created from any logical reasoning.  Jacques Werth observed and documented what the top producing salespeople were actually doing, regardless of whether any of it made sense or not.  So he discovered HPS.  He did not invent it. 

Most of your pet peeves are things that really effective salespeople already avoid doing.  So we teach our students to stop doing those things.  Not because it makes sense (even though it does), but because it works better. 

I find that making sense of something is useful, because it helps me remember details, but making sense doesn’t make an idea any truer. 

Aristotle had an idea about falling objects that made perfect sense (and still does).  It was so perfect that no one thought to question it for almost 2000 years.  Then Galileo actually tried it out. 

I think selling is a little bit like that.  Traditional selling makes a lot of sense, until you look at it much more closely. 

I’d love to put your thoughts (and my response) in an article on the blog.  May I have your permission to do that?  And if yes, do you want to be identified in that article, or not? 

Carl Ingalls

Please feel welcome to add comments with your own pet peeves about what salespeople say and do when they call.

Where the Heck Are These High Probability Prospects Anyway?

A Review of the Neil Myers’ Recording on High Probability Prospects, led by Paul Bunn (recording available here, $50 USD)

This week’s HPS Community Forum will be a live discussion on a previously recorded HPS workshop segment that delivers a mutual understanding of the HPS paradigm shift as it applies to your prospects, markets, and sales experience. 

For those of you who are relatively new to HPS, a High Probability Prospect is defined as follows:  Someone who needs, wants, and is willing and able to buy from you now, if you can meet the prospect’s conditions of satisfaction.

The challenge of course is, in a world in which salespeople are expected to make people into sales, by the force and irresistible rhetoric of the salesperson’s skills, how could these High Probability Prospects (HPPs) even exist?  Why haven’t I seen them before?  You have seen them, and you probably have been one, but never realized it.

One of the first steps in being able to “see” these HPPs is to realize they not only exist, but they have been right under our collective noses for decades.  Like other perspective shift experiences, realizing the presence of these HPPs is like viewing auto-stereograms, also known as Magic Eye 3D, (see Hidden Illusions That’ll Make Your Brain Hurt on BuzzFeed).

Once you’ve seen the hidden image, seeing it again gets easier and easier through practice. This HPS Forum session is intended to provide a similar “aha” level of awareness of the paradigm shift, which will provide a foundation for understanding and implementing HPS with minimal stress and effort.

By the end of this session, you should be able to answer the following FAQs:
Do HPPs really exist?
What creates HPPs?
Who creates HPPs?
What exactly are they?
How have I missed seeing them before?
Can HPPs be created by me?
Are there enough of them out there?

When:  Thursday 5 June 2025 at 9:30 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Google Calendar Link

[Zoom access details removed]

This meeting will be recorded.  A link to the recording will be emailed to the people who attend this meeting.  If you want a copy of the recording for this particular meeting, and are not sure that you will be able to attend, please let us know before the meeting begins.

There is no charge to attend.  You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues.

Turn Cold Calling Into Warm Calling

Listen to a recording of Jacques Werth, the founder of High Probability Selling, explain how to transition from making cold prospecting calls to warm prospecting calls:

Sales Techniques and Closing – A Conversation on Reddit

The following conversation is copied from the subReddit called “Sales Techniques”.

Here is the opening question:

I sell a pretty high ticket item at $7000 over zoom meetings. My average is to close 5-6 new clients per week. BUT, I miss on another 10 or so. Yes that is a great close ratio and my employer is incredibly happy with that. But I cannot seem to shake off the ones I miss.. anyone else? Oh, 2025 will be my 35th year in sales, you would think I was over this by now..

Here is how I (Paul Bunn, aka Illustrious_Bunnster) replied:

There is a way to reduce the number of appointments with the prospects who aren’t likely to buy in the first place.

By this point, you probably intuitively know at least half of the low probability prospects that don’t really qualify for an appointment yet.

Use the criteria for those that buy to (temporarily) disqualify the ones who don’t really fit, that you might hope will buy but don’t.

When you become more selective about whom you meet with, your number of sales will actually increase overall AND compared to the number of appointments you book.

It will initially feel like you’re going to “lose” sales, but you can’t lose sales that aren’t going to follow through anyway.

The time and energy you save from meeting with low probability prospects will lead to more “found” sales who are looking for a salesperson with higher standards.

High Probability Prospecting Offer Clinic

We are in the process of designing a special series of coaching sessions that focus on High Probability Prospecting Offers. Details will follow.

Meanwhile, if you have questions or comments or suggestions, you can reach us by any of the following:

Troubleshooting Prospecting – Beyond the Offer

There’s often more to a High Probability Outbound Prospecting Offer than whether or not it fits the template.  

And many, including myself, have spent a long frustrating time trying to figure out the High Prob Prospecting offer that “WORKS BEST”.  Especially when the one we thought would “WORK” doesn’t seem to connect, nor deliver. Something is missing, but we can’t quite “see” it.

Almost always the offer is well written and structured and it meets the HPS offer criteria and attributes.  But it doesn’t produce anything useful.  Sometimes, it’s not entirely the offer.  The mismatch is in the factors beyond the scope of the offer itself. 

List design, target market, real market, location, timing, competitors, changing markets, prospect perspectives of value, our perception of value, etc.

The next time it seems like your offer “DOESN’T work”, step back and look beyond the words, Beyond the Offer.